


S2 Various Flashfics

by chimosa



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Flash Fic, Just re-watched s2 so let's do this thing, M/M, Tumblr, What do you want to see?, taking requests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-06-03
Packaged: 2018-03-26 12:16:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3850657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chimosa/pseuds/chimosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>1. Blood.</b> <i>Will Graham’s blood was on Hannibal’s clothes, between his finger nails, matted into the hair of his chest.</i><br/><b>2. Sex.</b> <i>It happened one time.</i><br/><b>3. Different.</b> <i>Abigail spends most of her days drugged to the gills.</i><br/><b>4. Parallel.</b> <i>So he left. </i><br/><b>5. Remains.</b> <i>By some strange legal alchemy, Will Graham was left the executor of Hannibal’s estate.</i><br/><b>6. Dead language.</b> <i>“Looks like <i>someone</i> has got themselves an admirer.”</i></p><p>Complete.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted (with photos) to: http://chimosastuff.tumblr.com/  
> 

He was loath to remove his clothing. 

As clearly as Hannibal Lecter knew how this night ended- with him pristine, naturally, on a plane out of the country, a companion by his side- still, he hesitated. 

His shirt was beyond repair, torn and bloodied and it would need to be destroyed, of course. Hannibal’s rational mind could see it for the damning evidence that it was, and there was a time, not so long ago, when he was nothing but rational minded, a distant god playing a game of autoclaved chess with lesser beings. But that was before. 

Before Will Graham.

Hannibal wasn’t completely devoid of emotion. There had always been the slightest glimmer of sentiment in his breast, and he had come to liken it to the smallest fleck of silver held firm between great tons of rock. Easily spied but impossible to pry away and the immobility of that fleck had given Hannibal great comfort. Sentimentality was there, yes, but it was stagnant and he was confident that nothing and nobody could change that. 

_“I already did.”_

Now he had come to realize that that glimmer had turned into a glow, perhaps it always had been; a smoldering ember that burned as it waited to be stoked. Every whispered confession, every late night conversation, every shared meal, every companionable kill, all these things were the bellows and Will Graham was the sweet, nurturing oxygen that turned that ember into a fire. 

While Hannibal had been glorying in his ability to transform Will Graham into his own image, so too had Will been laying the groundwork for Hannibal’s transformation.

Will Graham’s blood was on Hannibal’s clothes, between his finger nails, matted into the hair of his chest. For a man that did most of his killing in a suit of plastic, it was unspeakably intimate. 

But it was time to go. There was a freshly cleaned and pressed suit in the closet of the hotel suite he had booked under the name of a man he had eaten long ago. 

He unbuttoned his shirt with fingers gone tacky, and stared in the mirror until he was as composed as he had ever been. The only person in the world that his countenance wouldn’t fool was laying disemboweled twenty miles away. 

And if he mourned the loss of this last bit of the man as he bathed away the blood that clung to his skin...

Well it was a bitter comfort that his ability to regret Will Graham’s passing was a lasting testament to the man that might have been his friend.


	2. Chapter 2

It happened one time. 

Will had told Jack he was a good fisherman. He had told him the secret was to have the right kind of lure. So, with Randall Tier’s unquestionably dead body splayed on the dining table between them, Will had a fisherman’s instinct that Hannibal was well and truly hooked. 

He watched as Hannibal gently wrapped gauze around his raw and bloodied knuckles. 

“How will you repay him?” Hannibal asked and Will let his gaze become distant, let himself fall into the yawning, dark chasm of his imagination. Will knew he had a chance to keep Hannibal on the line. He could be bait for just a little while longer. 

“Stay with me,” Hannibal repeated, closer than before. 

“Give me a reason to,” Will said and, with the speed of a striking snake, Will caught Hannibal’s lips with his own. 

Hannibal was, of course, ready for him. 

With a broad palm on either side of Will’s face, Hannibal held firm until Will slowed from furious, blind want to something more civilized. Under Hannibal’s unyielding direction, Will’s mouth opened and he was tasted. Teeth grazed a tease across his bottom lip and Will could feel his head tip back, his neck bared in supplication.

“There now,” Hannibal said, words lingering at the pulse point in Will’s neck as he stilled. “Isn’t it better this way?”

“Do you kiss Alana like this?” Will asked, a still danger in his voice. When Hannibal didn’t respond Will snorted. “That’s what I thought.” 

Will stood, and he poured every moment of frustration, of anger, of righteous fury he had felt for the man before him into his next words: “Don’t touch me like you touch her. I know you, Hannibal Lecter. I know what you are. Don’t pretend with me.”

With grim determination, Will met Hannibal’s eyes, his own sparking with barely contained electricity. If Hannibal was the approaching train, then Will was the third rail. 

“I want to see the real you.”

There was a shift in Hannibal’s face, the tiniest of movements, and suddenly Will could see it all: the darkness, the cold predator that lurked behind the pressed suits and careful table manners. 

Like breaking the surface of an iced-over lake, Will had a moment- one cool clear, dizzying breath- to wonder what he had unleashed, before he was dragged back down into the swirling abyss.

Hannibal was hunger. As Will was grasped and pushed and held down with a bruising-hard grip, Will began to understand it in a way that made everything until this moment into a well-mannered intimation. Hannibal was hunger, an all-consuming, un-relenting hunger that Will could empathize with only too well. It had been so long since he had been touched, he craved every scrape of nails and sharp bite of teeth with all the want of a man deprived, but had Will ever been touched like this? 

Hannibal peeled Will’s clothes off his body, and he might as well have peeled his skin back, too: Will felt eviscerated.

When Hannibal produced the foil of a condom, Will knocked it away. “I want all of you,” he said, foolishness a heady thing.

Will was positioned and held as Hannibal readied to enter him, and Will wasn’t afraid of the pain that was sure to come- pain was something he could handle. He was prepared for the burning friction of the other man’s cock, just as he was prepared for the extraordinary intimacy of it all. To have this man- this terrible, powerful man- inside him with nothing to separate their flesh, their breath, their sweat from fusing, melding, becoming one; he knew he could steel himself for that.

But the one thing Will wasn’t prepared for was that he would like it so much. 

With each thrust in, Will could feel another facet of his sense of self erode. With each squeeze of the hands at his hips, he began to feel something he hadn’t felt for another person in longer than he could remember: tenderness.

Behind him, he could feel Hannibal’s powerful body as it began to quake, speed up, and Will knew with intolerable certainty that soon it would be over. Soon they would return to their games and machinations and secrets. Would he ever be as known again as he was in this moment, with this man? Would he ever know another person as perfectly as he knew Hannibal Lecter again?

“Wait,” Will called, grasping behind him until he felt the graceful curve of the other man’s neck, slid down the slick of sweat to touch his shoulder. “Slow down.”

Hannibal bent, his nose buried into Will’s hair, and he didn’t have to see the smile as it formed when Hannibal breathed in deep.

“Make it last a little while longer.”


	3. Chapter 3

Abigail spends most of her days drugged to the gills. 

She would worry more, but anytime she forms a complete thought in the clouded abyss of her mind, it melts away, like cotton candy in the rain. Words come to her, and sometimes she cares enough to speak them out loud. On occasion they even string together, make a sentence, and it reminds her of home and the holidays, when her mom would use a needle and thread to string popcorn and make a garland for the Christmas tree and she feels a distant pang of almost-but-not-quite-remorse for their last Christmas when she rolled her eyes when Mom wanted to string popcorn and instead she went over to Marissa’s and when she got back Mom was alone on the couch, stringing popcorn to a muted TV playing “It’s a Wonderful Life” and she thought for a moment about how this was what growing up must feel like, betraying your childhood traditions and leaving your parents to muted TV shows you no longer care anything about and she figured she’d make it up to her mom the next year, would try to remember this sinking pit in her belly, and next Christmas she’d _really_ try to be a better daughter and then they’d have popcorn together and strings and...

And now Abigail’s forgotten how she got here, thinking about popcorn while tears slide from her eyes and down her temples. She doesn’t bother to wipe them away; she’s lying down and her hand weighs a million pounds and is really too far away to be of any use. 

When she does speak, Abigail sticks to the odd word here or there, even when they don’t quite work the way they should. Sometimes she says “blue” when she means “hello” or “blanket” when she means “medicine”.

Some sentences are easier than others. They are the ones she’s said so many times they spring to her lips fully formed and hardly considered. Sentences like “I’m fine, how are you?” and “whatever’s easiest” and “when’s Will coming back?”

Because that’s the one thing she remembers and she clings to it. Will was there with her and then he wasn’t and then there was Hannibal. After that it gets murky, but the last thing she remembers- before the darkness lapped in like an inky-black tide- is Hannibal’s palm on her head and his mesmerizing voice assuring her that it will be all right, that as soon as Will gets back they can...

She’s not sure what, but she knows that she is in a kind of stasis, waiting for Will and when he’s back, then things will be different. It’s hard to picture what “different” might be like, especially since it’s starting to feel like she’s never known a time before this, where her body feels like just so many motes of dust and at any moment they might vibrate apart and she’ll cease to be, but “different” is something that she’s looking forward to. 

The best times are the ones when Hannibal unlocks her door and instead of bringing with him a fresh coating of nothingness, he leads her by her elbow to his kitchen. Sometimes it’s dark outside the windows, and sometimes it’s light, but no matter the time of day, it’s always breakfast. She watches as he whisks eggs and chops potatoes from her perch on the countertop, and she tries to form sentences that wander as soon as she starts them. They make him smile and soon she’s laughing so she tries again, words joining and disintegrating until Hannibal laughs. Laughing feels good, so she does it, too, and louder. 

“Are you ready to eat?” he asks and this one she knows the answer to.

“Whatever’s easiest,” she says and it’s like skipping down a familiar, well-trod path.

When they get settled, Hannibal asks if she needs help with the knife she got lost staring at the light refracting off of.

She shakes her head clear and she knows the answer to this one too: “I’m fine, how are you?”

A couple of bites in and her mouth moves, forming words she barely listens to.

“When’s Will coming back?” she asks, finally.

“Soon,” he says.

Which is good, because as nice as it is- breakfast and hazes that mean she can’t feel any pain- she’s ready for _different_.

Different can’t come soon enough.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Tinumbra's prompt

He had two options, the way he saw it. He could spend the rest of his life trying to find and capture Hannibal Lecter.

Or not.

As Graham lay in a hospital bed, the stitching that held his guts together pulling at his every breath, he could feel the strain of his indecisiveness. Go or stay, go or stay. And maybe if he had left the hospital when he had first come to, like he had felt called to, things might have been different. Instead he stayed, waited until he was officially released from the hospital, and that somehow was that.

He returned to the home that was no longer a home, no longer his sanctuary in the middle of the woods. No, it had been defiled, and now that he knew to look for Lecter’s fingerprints, he could see nothing else. All the lies, all the manipulations, they piled on top of each other, stacking like bricks, and there was no room for him here.

So he left.

He loaded the dogs into the truck and drove until he ran out of road, somewhere along the Florida Keys. Here, out by the water and the other drunks, he carved out a place for himself. Not a home, he didn’t know if he’d ever have the luxury of feeling at home again, but a place to live and that was enough. He began to settle into a routine, taking the little boat out to fish most days the weather was good and drinking when the weather was bad. He kept his head down when he went around, and eventually his neighbors stopped trying to be so neighborly and the bartenders knew to just pour his whiskey and leave the small talk for the other locals. 

His skin became brown from the long days in the sun and his hands became rough like his old man’s. He wasn’t lonely, not when he had his dogs. Not when his house was always crowded with the ghosts of all his mistakes and transgressions.

And then, one day, he came home to something more substantial than a ghost.

“Hello, Will.”

Graham blinked, wavered on his unsteady feet, but that was from the drink, not surprise at seeing Hannibal Lecter in front of him after all these years. The light switch didn’t work, and if that was from the storm outside or Lecter’s doing, Graham was too drunk to care.

“You can have the bed,” Graham said, toeing off his shoes and shaking the rain from his hair. “I’ll take the couch.”

And that was the arrangement, until one day it wasn’t.

Beside him, Graham knew Lecter was just as awake as he was, but he didn’t try to talk. He never did when Graham was lost in thought, and for that he was grateful. Instead, Lecter stared into the dark and laid a proprietary hand over the uneven skin of Graham’s belly and it was what it was.

As the days passed and he watched Lecter settle into his house and pet his dogs and insist on shaving the beard Graham hadn’t bothered with in months, he began to realize that the choice all that time ago as he laid in a hospital bed in Baltimore had never been between going or staying. 

It had always been whether he would find Lecter or Lecter would find him. 

And maybe, if he had left when he had come to things would have been different. There might have been more blood spilled, more misunderstandings and manipulations and the body count would have filled the spaces between them. 

But Lecter had found him. And that was that.


	5. Chapter 5

Hannibal Lecter, global fugitive and serial killer at large, was found dead in a bath tub in Rome. 

Freddie Lounds dedicated an entire week in his honor on tattlecrime.com, linking him to just about every bizarre death and unaccounted for disappearance in the continental United States. 

“Don’t you think it’s a little crass?” Will Graham asked, scrolling through an online gallery of the Chesapeake Ripper’s “Best Of” list.

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Freddie said, her voice fuzzy, the clack of computer keys tapping like a cascade and Will suspected he was on speaker phone. “Lecter would have hated it,” she said with a gleeful laugh.

By some strange legal alchemy, Will Graham was left the executor of Hannibal’s estate. Not that that meant much of anything, seeing as the majority of it was seized by the government. Still, it meant that one afternoon he opened his door to find Jack Crawford on his porch holding a small cardboard box.

“Will,” he said, his voice as solemn as it ever was. The sunglasses he wore were mirrored and Will could see himself-- brow pinched in confusion, eyes rimmed red from another late night, one-man bender-- just as Jack did. 

Will stepped into the doorframe. He was wary of letting Jack in any further, and the other man had sense enough not to push the matter. Instead, he held the box to Will and didn’t say a word.

Inscrutable bastard. 

“What’s this?”

“Hannibal Lecter. What’s left of him, anyway.”

“You don’t really believe that’s him, do you?” Will asked, crossing his arms.

“Not at all. But as far as the United States government is concerned, Hannibal Lecter’s body was found and identified by the Italian government and to entertain doubts to the contrary would cause a serious breach in international politics. So, here,” Jack pushed the box into Will’s hands until he had no choice but to take it. “This belong to you.”

As the afternoon light sifted into late afternoon gold along the wall, Will considered the box on his mantle as he sipped from a glass of Malbec. Wasn’t so long ago Will went for drinking whatever was cheapest or nearest at hand, but Hannibal had broadened Will’s palate in ways that still lingered. 

He wondered who it was that was in the box. Will hadn’t heard from Hannibal in a year, no murder tableaus drenched in pointed metaphor, no whispers of sightings from roundabout sources. But, if he’d gone to the trouble of making Will executor, then chances were good the ashes he’d been sent were going to be somebody worth the effort. 

But, he was disinclined to take the bait. Because, Will could see it for the bait it was. No doubt he was probably supposed to be railing at Crawford right now, about how Hannibal wasn’t dead. He was supposed to be insisting they test the ashes and there, hidden oh-so-cleverly would no doubt be a single clue as to Hannibal’s whereabouts. The clue would take them to a more solid lead and then there would be the next few months of his life. In the end there’d be nothing but more death, more blood, and Will had taken leave from all of that. 

Hannibal Lecter, where ever he was holed up, was bored; that was plain to see. So, instead of doing any of it, Will left the ashes and their clues on his mantle and went about his life.

The day he came home from a morning on the river fishing to find Hannibal in his living room was less of a surprise than it should have been. 

“Hello, Will,” Hannibal said in that familiar, supercilious tone. He didn’t turn from his perusal of the cardboard box where Will had left it to steadily accumulate dust. Hannibal’s hands were clasped behind his back and he looked for all the world like a patron at an art museum, but Will wasn’t fooled. There was no doubt something sharp and deadly hidden up those pressed sleeve of his.

“Here, do something with these,” Will said, kicking a cooler full of freshly caught fish Hannibal’s way. “I need a shower.”

He took his time with it, too, letting the hot water sluice away the sweat and river gunk that had managed to get past the waders. The steam curled around the edges of the bathroom and whited out the mirror. Somewhere downstairs he could smell the beginnings of a meal taking shape. 

Tipping his face upward into the shower’s spray, Will smiled. 

Hannibal had missed him. Where ever he had gotten to and whomever he had been with hadn’t been distraction enough to prevent that. And Will had just enough Hannibal Lecter still kicking around his head to admit that he had missed the other man, too.


	6. Chapter 6

“Now that’s an interesting arrangement,” the night nurse clucks as she checks Will’s vitals. The vase of flowers had appeared one morning between breakfast and a PT session, a riotous affair of pink-edged purple and accents of morose, drooping fuchsia stalks. 

“Looks like _someone_ has got themselves an admirer.”

Will, of course, doesn’t respond. He never responds to the perfunctory banality that passes for small talk in hospitals. The weather has never interested him as a topic of discussion in the best of circumstances, and it matters even less to him after a week of lying in a hospital bed. “How’re you doing?” and other inquires as to his well being seem redundant when he’s hooked up to machines whose sole purpose it is to quantify that very question. 

And if the nurse that is checking his blood pressure had the same suspicions as Will as to the identity of his so-called “admirer”... 

Well, it’s a good thing she doesn’t.

The same can’t be said for Jimmy Price, unfortunately.

“I take it you aren’t much of a botanist,” comes his supercilious tone as Will blinks awake. Price is using a wooden tongue depressor to poke through the arrangement, combing the flowers with a professional hand.

“Meaning?” Will grunts out. It’s been a week since he woke from his coma, and close to a month since that bloody night at Hannibal’s home. Each breath is agony, but it’s an agony he is careful to keep to himself. He doesn’t want his mind addled by opioids, not when Hannibal is still at large. 

“The flowers,” Price removes the latex gloves he must have lifted from the nearby supply drawer, the snap of them a familiar sound, one Will has long associated with the other man. “They’re cute. In a macabre way.”

This time Will doesn’t bother to waste his breath, instead he lifts an eyebrow and Price is all too eager to share. 

“Dianthus barbatus,” he says, jabbing a finger at the squat, broad-petaled ones. “Commonly called ‘Sweet William.’”

Will rolls his eyes and the scientist smirks even more. “And,” he has to breathe before continuing. “the other?”

“Amaranth,” comes the answers but there’s a peculiar smile hovering across the other man’s lips: a joke waiting for the punchline.

“Amaranth?” 

“Love-lies-bleeding.”

Will groans, knowing full well these flowers will do little to dispel the rumors that have been floating around the halls of the FBI since Will had been released from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Maybe even before then, if the side-eyed looks passed between Zeller and Katz were anything to go on. 

Price isn’t the only one that visits. Zeller stops by out of guilt or some latent sense of duty, and it might have been awkward, but Will decides to feign sleep until he is gone. 

When she is well enough, Alana Bloom comes, as does Jack.

Nobody mentions Abigail, and it’s for the best.

Under the flickering fluorescent lights of Will’s recovery room, the flowers in the vase begin to wilt. It’s a reminder that time is passing, something that is all too easy to forget between the sterility of the room and the dark pull of his imagination. A nurse offers to throw the flowers out but Will won’t let her. He finds comfort in the limp and shriveled marker of days gone by. 

Finally, one day when the purples and pink Sweet William have decayed to brown and the Love-lies-bleeding are barren, Will is allowed to leave.

Alana had wanted to be the one to drive him home, but since she’s only just been released herself, Will quietly signs the last of the paper work and asks a receptionist to call him a cab. 

The short steps to his front door take what’s left of his energy and he has to lean heavily on the cane the physical therapist had insisted on. It reminds him of Chilton, the cane, and on that principal alone he had thought about refusing it altogether, but he’s sort of glad now that he didn’t. 

Will fiddles with his key, and if Hannibal is waiting for him on the other side of the door, it won’t take much to take Will down in the state that he’s in. 

The dogs are still being boarded, so he isn’t surprised by their absence when he finally gets the door open. What he is surprised by are the flowers that fill his living room. 

Hanging from the ceiling in baskets and blanketing the floorboards, his house has turned into a veritable greenhouse, the sweet-spice of the plants is all but overwhelming after so long among sickness and cleaner. His footsteps are softened by the soil that covers the floor, inches thick, and the effect is as beautiful and theatrical as any scene Hannibal has ever staged, though Will can’t help but think of what a bitch it will be to clean up.

This time he doesn’t have Jimmy Price’s vast knowledge of plant life to help him identify the shrubs of tiny white-and-pink flowers that fill his home, but a cheap plastic marker that’s been left in one of the hanging plants identifies this invasion as “geraniums, nutmeg.” 

A quick google search yields the information he’s seeking, and he’s familiar enough with Hannibal’s whimsical side to scroll past the practicalities of geranium-growing to the more romantic links, the ones that spell out the dead language of flower-giving.

“I expect a meeting,” the nutmeg geraniums are meant to say.

_Well,_ Will thinks. _So do I._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it, guys! Thanks so much for reading along as I marked the time until the new season. I hope you've enjoyed the drabbles. As always, feedback is always appreciated ;-)
> 
> Happy season three, everyone!

**Author's Note:**

> If you have anything you want to see me write about season 2- a word, a photo, anything- just give me a holler and we'll see what comes of it


End file.
